Minus Man, The

Boston Globe Jay Carr

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Variety Glen Lovell

The kind of muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Eerie, quietly compelling... a fresh and mesmerizing experience...such an unsettling experience you find yourself still taking it all in well after the lights have gone up.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Low-key, understated style. The suspense beats away underneath.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Excellent acting and a finely tuned screenplay spark this genuinely offbeat melodrama.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

With no climactic showdown and no comforting revelation of motive or reassuring psychoanalytic diagnosis, the nerve-rattling potential of this sly, paranoia-inducing story may sink in only later.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

Less interesting for what it has to say about evil -- namely, that it's banal/unknowable/random/everywhere -- than for the microsurgical procedures it performs on genre conventions and expectations.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

It's a drab, familiar story with no oomph (and less humor than you'd think), and it's inconsistent.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

A film without attitude or mystery...an exquisitely executed, and exquisitely banal, treatise on the banality of evil.

Film.com Peter Brunette

Fancher seems uninterested in developing real suspense, or incapable of it, at least until the end, when there's plenty of it, but artificially imposed.

Dallas Observer Andy Klein

Doesn't show us much of anything we haven't seen better already.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

The film ultimately has no contrast and we can't figure out whom to like or dislike.

USA Today Mike Clark

There is no tension here. Actually, The Minus Man is minus a lot - intensity, a point of view, maybe even a point - and that equals an unsatisfying film.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The banality of faceless evil isn't actually all that compelling on the hoof; the film's more interesting as a curiosity than as a film.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

There are absolutely no psychological insights into sick minds in The Minus Man, a poky, opaque drama with a good cast and not much going on upstairs.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.

Salon.com Jeff Stark

If you're dragged to the theater to be someone's not-dumb date, pack a crossword and a light pen. It'll be the only puzzle worth solving.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.

TNT RoughCut Christopher Brandon

Really a big fat zero. Hampton Fancher has done the unthinkable -- he's made a boring serial killer movie.